23.3.09

Many students pointed out that the documentary on the Jonestown mass suicide showed examples of the three kinds of conformity identified by psychologists: compliance, internalisation, and identification. The psychologist Phillip Zimbardo has written about the Jamestown mass suicide as an example of the power of the situation and as an example of how situational forces can lead ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

Jonestown (The Situation of Evil) Revisited

With the 30th Anniversary of the Jonestown Mass Suicide upon us, now is a good time to republish the three-part Situationist series from 2007 on the “Situational Sources of Evil” — published also in the January/February 2007 edition of the Yale Alumni Magazine and based on my book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, March 2007).